Information Security Commons^™

Why Certified Iot Devices Remain Untrustworthy, Donald Privitera

Master of Science in Information Technology Theses

Digital networked devices also known as Internet of Things (IoT) are ubiquitous today and are now a fundamental part of the functioning of the US digital economy and comprise a significant part of people’s daily activities. These devices have been shown to be insecure in general especially at categories that include any of the following: low-cost, home use, small business, and factory automation. There are continuing research and news reports showing Internet connected devices contain backdoors of various origins whether they be placed intentionally or are discovered as vulnerabilities. These types of devices are of concern because they are critical …

Evaluation Of Routing Protocols With Ftp And P2p, Tyler Wilson, Eman Abdelfattah, Samir Hamada

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

One of the decisions that need to be made when designing and configuring a computer network in which routing protocol should be used. This paper presents a simulation of a high load File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Application and a high load Peer to Peer (P2P) Application using Riverbed Academic Modeler 17.5. The simulation is configured and run in a World environment to replicate a global network. Each simulation employs either RIP, OSPF, or EIGRP routing protocol. The queuing delay, throughput, link utilization, and IP packets dropped are used as performance parameters to determine which routing protocol is the most efficient …

Epoca House: The Implementation Strategy, Courtney Thomas, Yaffa Fain, Shuxiao Teng, Mingjun Xie

School of Professional Studies

This capstone report provides a written strategic implementation plan for EPOCA House. EPOCA, Ex-Prisoners and Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancement, is a non-profit dedicated to creating better resources and opportunities for prisoners and ex-prisoners in Worcester. The organization’s most recent initiative, EPOCA House, is a transitional facility that will provide reentry services and temporary housing to ex-offenders in and around the Worcester area. Recently, Massachusetts passed a comprehensive criminal justice reform bill that will dramatically reduce the number of people being incarcerated; however, little attention is focused on what will happen to individuals after they leave prison. At the same …

A Guide For Hiring Mature Employees At Ascentria, Binghe Change, Calleigh Leach, Elsie Lu, Hongquiang You, Mengge Wang, Nina Mariotti

School of Professional Studies

This paper will explore existing literature on aspects of an intergenerational workplace in a nonprofit organization and provide recommendations for recruiting and retaining older employees for a human service organization, Ascentria Care Alliance, in Worcester, MA. The paper will review research on trends in the nonprofit industry, a comprehensive breakdown of generational workplace values, reasons people are returning to work and effective marketing strategies that appeal to older generations. Marketing strategies specifically will explore best practices for website design, social media usage, and job descriptions. Additionally, this paper will research case studies of nonprofits with successful intergenerational workforce initiatives, as …

Clear The Air: Moving Towards A More Supportive, Welcoming, Tobacco-Free Clark University, Edward Aroko, Simon Elliot, Jackson Espe, Donovan Smith, Michael Spanos

School of Professional Studies

The deleterious health effects of the consumption of tobacco products, especially for youth, have been documented thoroughly and are nearly universally recognized. Numerous federal, state, and local regulations, coupled with health education and tobacco cessation initiatives have been launched to address these effects. Although these pushes have done much to reduce the rates of preventable health conditions and death due to the usage of tobacco, there remains much work to be done at the local level to discourage and disrupt patterns of substance use and abuse. The mission of Clark Clear the Air is to propose various and creative ways …

Inbound Marketing, Hasini Assiriyage, Isabelle Zoeckler, Emmanuel Aghado, Kefu Bu, Xiouyu Jiang, Rajesh Kamble, Yan Wang

School of Professional Studies

This study looks into inbound marketing practice through the process of secondary research. This insight on best practices and market examples have been employed in order to identify the benefits of Inbound Marketing for the School of Professional Studies at Clark University. Through the research, this team has consolidated a number of recommendations for the SPS marketing strategies moving forward. A focus has been placed on identifying solutions, which were effective and financially feasible. The primary solutions are internally sourced; with a future long term recommendation of seeking advice from a third party firm to automate the process.

Adult Learners: A Targeted Marketing Approach, Sarah Baldelli, Camilo Botero, Camille Ferreol, Caleb Horton, Xinyue Ma, Stefan Sprinkmoller

School of Professional Studies

The development of the Adult Learner Capstone Project started with a focus and need to learn more about affinity groups in the Worcester area in order to reach the potential adult learner demographic. Although some partnerships already existed, the Director of Marketing and Communications for Graduate Admissions, Tara Probeck, yearned to explore the potential partnerships and alternative uses of professional organizations to market to the current working professionals. From this idea, our capstone project was introduced in hopes of establishing a comprehensive and exhaustive list of potential organizational partnerships, specific for the School of Professional Studies.

My Choice Greens, Alina Zulfikarova, Amelia Mohr, Hesi Zhang, Ruiqi Huang, Sean Tatar, Yuhao Zhou, Zijun Zhou

School of Professional Studies

My Choice Programs for Independent Living is a nonprofit in Worcester, Massachusetts that helps individuals with special needs. In 2016, My Choice Programs added a branch to their organization called My Choice Greens. My Choice Greens is committed to growing fresh produce in their hydroponic farm. The profit generated from selling their vegetables is put back into direct programming for My Choice Programs. My Choice Greens is the first hydroponic farm in Worcester, but unfortunately not many people are aware of their program. Also, since they are a small nonprofit, they do not have sufficient funding or resources to market …

Optical Heritage Museum: An Interactive Touch, Connor Guerin, Ankur Halwai, Jinzhao Liu, Qi Liu, Yangjing Wang, Yashaswini Bharti

School of Professional Studies

Optical Heritage Museum (OHM) was established in 1983 with the aim to preserve, promote and display historical artifacts of the optics industry and educate all of its vital role optics has played in societal development. Over the years, the museum has grown in its physical space along with exhibit development to engage audiences in innovative, effective methods. Clark University’s School of Professional Studies department and curator of Optical Heritage Museum, Mr. Whitney’s Whitney, have establish a collaboration that has spanned over two semesters with the goal to support and aid in improving OHM. Our capstone group was assigned the task …

Leicester Research A Study In Effective Technology In Education, Jimeshkumar Chauhan, Anna Lakomy, Li Liu, Christina Mccarthy, Scott Mccarthy, Roman Pena, Emilie Smiley

School of Professional Studies

The LPS Research Team has been tasked with researching and recommending a technology plan for a new school that Leicester Public Schools is planning to build. In this paper, we present an overview of the our goals and our client’s goals, an introduction to industry trends, and discuss our findings based on research conducted via interviews with schools that have undergone similar projects. We also outline the conclusions drawn from this research and our analysis of the data we uncovered, and make specific recommendations for technology to be utilized in Leicester’s new school. Finally, we present a 3-part framework that …

Leicester Public Schools Information And Data Portal: Research And Recommendations, Yue Cen, Natalie Bonetti, Rashida Buchanan, Sathark Jain, Yuwei Wong

School of Professional Studies

The purpose of this project is to develop a strategy for the creation of a multifaceted portal to help with the organization and dissemination of information about the Leicester public school district. The functionality of this portal is to provide comparative financial, demographic, and academic data to other relative school districts in the area, both for the parents’ and for the city’s reference. It will be an examination into the best practices for creating a portal, both technological and aesthetic recommendations, as well as research into the value the publication of this data would provide for the parents of current …

Water In Worcester A Campaign For Public Fluoridation, Ryan Early, Xiao Gu, Yajing Huang, Lauren Meininger, Emma Phillips, Yao Su

School of Professional Studies

Water in Worcester: A Campaign for Public Fluoridation arose as a project from our sponsors, Chris Philbin, Vice President of Government Relations at UMass Memorial Health Care, and Joe O’Brien, former Worcester Mayor, Executive Director of the Environmental League of Massachusetts, and Clark University Adjunct Professor. Our goal has been to produce resources that will support the fight for fluoridation in the City of Worcester. Fluoridation has failed to pass in Worcester on four separate occasions, but Mr. Philbin and Mr. O’Brien believe that the time has come to try again.

In order to fluoridate Worcester’s water supply, the municipal …

Canine For Disabled Kids Awareness Campaign Research And Implementation Plan, Jiamin Gu, Kendall Harcourt, Chang Liu, Kiamu Liu, Jemmie Tejada

School of Professional Studies

According to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) service animals are: “dogs that are individually trained to do work or perform tasks for people with disabilities” ( ADA, 2015). On the other hand, emotional support animals are: “dogs that provide comfort and support in forms of affection and companionship for an individual suffering from various mental and emotional conditions.” In addition, an emotional support animal is not required to perform any specific tasks for a disability like service dogs are (Ibid).

The ADA limits the number of questions that can be asked to protect the privacy of utilizers. In fact, …

Life Can Change In The Blink Of An Eye Capstone, Christopher Rutigliano, Jillian Elalaoui, Kristin Humphrey, Phillip Gates, Mohamed Ndjikam, Highness Meena, Adam Menard, Spencer Pickney

School of Professional Studies

Texting and driving is one of the most widespread and uncontrollable of epidemics that have arose to prominence in the 21st century. Texting and driving is now a global issue, that has left nations across the road scrambling to implement new laws and preventative measures to stunt the increasing rates of accidents and fatalities caused by texting and driving. The severity of the issue has lead to a multitude of different entities ranging from domestic and foreign governments, cell phone and car manufacturers, cell phone carriers, and insurance agencies to seek new methods to prevent texting and driving. Determining the …

A Social Media Plan For The Changemakers’ Playground, Meng Cong, Ciara Kilian, Xinling Wang, Sumanth Wilson, Chenyu Yan

School of Professional Studies

The purpose of this project was to create a social media plan for the Changemakers’ Playground campaign. The Changemakers’ Playground is a website thought up by our client, Sarah Lange, whereby ordinary individuals doing extraordinary things in their community can be celebrated for the work they are doing. Each person featured on the website, also known as a Changemaker, was interviewed by Sarah and that interview was split into three videos to be posted on the Changemakers’ Playground website throughout the week they are being featured. In short, our task was to create the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram content to …

Efficient And Expressive Keyword Search Over Encrypted Data In The Cloud, Hui Cui, Zhiguo Wan, Deng, Robert H., Guilin Wang, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searchable encryption allows a cloud server to conduct keyword search over encrypted data on behalf of the data users without learning the underlying plaintexts. However, most existing searchable encryption schemes only support single or conjunctive keyword search, while a few other schemes that are able to perform expressive keyword search are computationally inefficient since they are built from bilinear pairings over the composite-order groups. In this paper, we propose an expressive public-key searchable encryption scheme in the prime-order groups, which allows keyword search policies (i.e., predicates, access structures) to be expressed in conjunctive, disjunctive or any monotonic Boolean formulas and …

A Home Security System Based On Smartphone Sensors, Michael Mahler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Several new smartphones are released every year. Many people upgrade to new phones, and their old phones are not put to any further use. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using such retired smartphones and their on-board sensors to build a home security system. We observe that door-related events such as opening and closing have unique vibration signatures when compared to many types of environmental vibrational noise. These events can be captured by the accelerometer of a smartphone when the phone is mounted on a wall near a door. The rotation of a door can also be captured …

File Fragment Classification Using Neural Networks With Lossless Representations, Luke Hiester

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This study explores the use of neural networks as universal models for classifying file fragments. This approach differs from previous work in its lossless feature representation, with fragments’ bits as direct input, and its use of feedforward, recurrent, and convolutional networks as classifiers, whereas previous work has only tested feedforward networks. Due to the study’s exploratory nature, the models were not directly evaluated in a practical setting; rather, easily reproducible experiments were performed to attempt to answer the initial question of whether this approach is worthwhile to pursue further, especially due to its high computational cost. The experiments tested classification …

Trade-Offs Between Monetary Gain And Risk Taking In Cybersecurity Behavior, X. Zhan, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, M. Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Phishers and hackers exploit users’ susceptibility to deception by providing incentives. This research focuses on studying the risk-taking behavior of users in downloading software from the Internet. We proposed an experimental study to assess the degree of risks that people are willing to take for monetary gains when they download software from uncertified sources.

Exploring Relationship Between Indistinguishability-Based And Unpredictability-Based Rfid Privacy Models, Anjia Yang, Yunhui Zhuang, Jian Weng, Gerhard Hancke, Duncan S. Wong, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A comprehensive privacy model plays a vital role in the design of privacy-preserving RFID authentication protocols. Among various existing RFID privacy models, indistinguishability-based (ind-privacy) and unpredictability-based (unp-privacy) privacy models are the two main categories. Unp*-privacy, a variant of unp-privacy has been claimed to be stronger than ind-privacy. In this paper, we focus on studying RFID privacy models and have three-fold contributions. We start with revisiting unp*-privacy model and figure out a limitation of it by giving a new practical traceability attack which can be proved secure under unp*-privacy model. To capture this kind of attack, we improve unp*-privacy model to …

Effect Of Probable And Guaranteed Monetary Value Gains And Losses On Cybersecurity Behavior Of Users, S. Ravindran, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, M. Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The objective of this research is to examine users’ cybersecurity behavior in monetary gain and loss scenarios. Using Prospect Theory, we hypothesize that users are more likely to engage in risky cybersecurity behavior to avoid monetary losses than to benefit from monetary gains. We also hypothesize that guaranteed gains have a greater effect on a user’s risk-taking behavior than potential gains, and potential losses have a greater effect on a user’s risk-taking behavior than guaranteed losses. An experimental study is proposed to test the research hypotheses.

Low Latency Intrusion Detection In Smart Grids, Israel Zairi Akingeneye

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The transformation of traditional power grids into smart grids has seen more new technologies such as communication networks and smart meters (sensors) being integrated into the physical infrastructure of the power grids. However, these technologies pose new vulnerabilities to the cybersecurity of power grids as malicious attacks can be launched by adversaries to attack the smart meters and modify the measurement data collected by these meters. If not timely detected and removed, these attacks may lead to inaccurate system state estimation, which is critical to the system operators for control decisions such as economic dispatch and other related functions.

This …

Expressive Query Over Outsourced Encrypted Data, Yang Yang, Ximeng Liu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data security and privacy concerns in cloud storage services compel data owners to encrypt their sensitive data before outsourcing. Standard encryption systems, however, hinder users from issuing search queries on encrypted data. Though various systems for search over encrypted data have been proposed in the literature, existing systems use different encrypted index structures to conduct search on different search query patterns and hence are not compatible with each other. In this paper, we propose a query over encrypted data system which supports expressive search query patterns, such as single/conjunctive keyword query, range query, boolean query and mixed boolean query, all …

Doas: Efficient Data Owner Authorized Search Over Encrypted Cloud Data, Yibin Miao, Jianfeng Ma, Ximeng Liu, Zhiquan Liu, Junwei Zhang, Fushan Wei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data outsourcing service can shift the local data storage and maintenance to cloud service provider (CSP) to ease the burden from data owner, but it brings the data security threats as CSP is always considered to honest-but-curious. Therefore, searchable encryption (SE) technique which allows cloud clients (including data owner and data user) to securely search over ciphertext through keywords and selectively retrieve files of interest is of prime importance. However, in practice, data user’s access permission always dynamically varies with data owner’s preferences. Moreover, existing SE schemes which are based on attribute-based encryption (ABE) incur heavy computational burden through attribution …

Learning From Mutants: Using Code Mutation To Learn And Monitor Invariants Of A Cyber-Physical System, Yuqi Chen, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) consist of sensors, actuators, and controllers all communicating over a network; if any subset becomes compromised, an attacker could cause significant damage. With access to data logs and a model of the CPS, the physical effects of an attack could potentially be detected before any damage is done. Manually building a model that is accurate enough in practice, however, is extremely difficult. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for constructing models of CPS automatically, by applying supervised machine learning to data traces obtained after systematically seeding their software components with faults ("mutants"). We demonstrate the …

Secure Multiparty Protocol For Differentially-Private Data Release, Anthony Harris

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In the era where big data is the new norm, a higher emphasis has been placed on models which guarantees the release and exchange of data. The need for privacy-preserving data arose as more sophisticated data-mining techniques led to breaches of sensitive information. In this thesis, we present a secure multiparty protocol for the purpose of integrating multiple datasets simultaneously such that the contents of each dataset is not revealed to any of the data owners, and the contents of the integrated data do not compromise individual’s privacy. We utilize privacy by simulation to prove that the protocol is privacy-preserving, …

Comparative Study Of Deep Learning Models For Network Intrusion Detection, Brian Lee, Sandhya Amaresh, Clifford Green, Daniel Engels

SMU Data Science Review

In this paper, we present a comparative evaluation of deep learning approaches to network intrusion detection. A Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) is a critical component of every Internet connected system due to likely attacks from both external and internal sources. A NIDS is used to detect network born attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, malware replication, and intruders that are operating within the system. Multiple deep learning approaches have been proposed for intrusion detection systems. We evaluate three models, a vanilla deep neural net (DNN), self-taught learning (STL) approach, and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based Long Short …

Blockchain In Payment Card Systems, Darlene Godfrey-Welch, Remy Lagrois, Jared Law, Russell Scott Anderwald, Daniel W. Engels

SMU Data Science Review

Payment cards (e.g., credit and debit cards) are the most frequent form of payment in use today. A payment card transaction entails many verification information exchanges between the cardholder, merchant, issuing bank, a merchant bank, and third-party payment card processors. Today, a record of the payment transaction often records to multiple ledgers. Merchant’s incur fees for both accepting and processing payment cards. The payment card industry is in dire need of technology which removes the need for third-party verification and records transaction details to a single tamper-resistant digital ledger. The private blockchain is that technology. Private blockchain provides a linked …

Computer Security Documentation For A Non-Technical Audience, Salman Quraishi

Undergraduate Research Celebration 2018

This research project investigates the development of computer security documentation. Computer security includes the protection of hardware, software, and/or digital information from theft and/or damage, along with preventing disruption or misdirection of the services a computer may provide.The scope of the research was to develop a document detailing the basic fundamental concepts of computer security that individuals of all backgrounds can use without requiring prerequisite knowledge of computer security. The core concepts of the document encompass phishing, social engineering, password security, trusted/untrusted networks, viruses, malware, and antivirus software. Both technical and non-technical individuals can utilize the document to learn how …

Quantum Attacks On Modern Cryptography And Post-Quantum Cryptosystems, Zachary Marron

Senior Honors Theses

Cryptography is a critical technology in the modern computing industry, but the security of many cryptosystems relies on the difficulty of mathematical problems such as integer factorization and discrete logarithms. Large quantum computers can solve these problems efficiently, enabling the effective cryptanalysis of many common cryptosystems using such algorithms as Shor’s and Grover’s. If data integrity and security are to be preserved in the future, the algorithms that are vulnerable to quantum cryptanalytic techniques must be phased out in favor of quantum-proof cryptosystems. While quantum computer technology is still developing and is not yet capable of breaking commercial encryption, these …